Dangerous doctors slipping through the cracks: It took the discovery of guns and grenades to suspend the license of a psychiatrist who some say should have come under scrutiny years earlier

One night a Crestwood police sergeant doing a routine building check noticed an open door to the office of psychiatrist Joel Carroll. Stepping inside the cluttered office, he discovered roaming cats, a Colt AR-15 assault rifle and other guns, ammunition, military-grade smoke grenades, sex toys, and pornography.

“Well, for the lack of better terminology, we considered it a pigsty,” Sgt. Thomas Kaniewski testified about his April 2009 discovery. “It looked in complete disarray. We couldn’t believe that someone could actually conduct business in an office like that because of the conditions it was in.”

When state regulators determined that Carroll had engaged in sexual misconduct and committed other violations of the state Medical Practice Act, they suspended his license, proclaiming him “a danger to his patients,” according to state records.

But the psychiatrist’s practice could have been shut down years earlier, after the Illinois Department of Corrections in 2007 found that Carroll — as a state contractor — committed inappropriate conduct with a female inmate and barred him from working in a prison, a Tribune investigation showed.

State agencies, county prosecutors, insurance companies, and health care employers and associations are mandatory reporters — they’re required to report potentially dangerous and unprofessional doctors to medical regulators, who can bar the doctors from practicing and keep patients out of harm’s way.

But the mandatory reporters sound few alarms, and when they do, regulators rarely take action, the Tribune found. There were 348 mandatory reports filed with the state in 2009. That’s out of nearly 46,000 physicians statewide. In only one case did the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation respond by suspending the physician’s license, records show.